She says, I'm beginning to understand something now. I think I know why you're here. Yes. I know why you're here. You're on a fishing expedition. You're hunting for material. Am I getting warm? Am I right?
The same word, "material," returns after many years, to reveal to the mature writer a blindness in the younger writer's understanding of the problem. Young Carver knew that material was a dangerous idea. He knew that putting life into art could be a tool of the artist's selfishness, and that it could slip into manipulation, self-flattery or exhibitionism. But the young Carver believed that irony could help. He believed that if Myers-Carver laughed at the Morgans, it would be all right if Myers-Carver's wife and their separation also leaked into the story.
The mature Carver doesn't have the same confidence in irony. The mature Carver admits his sin straight out; he almost implies that the power in his writing derives from that guilty, original theft. He begs for forgiveness, but he won't take it back or change his ways.
The last piece in the collection, "Errand," is not a story. When Marilynne Robinson reviewed Where I'm Calling From in The New York Times Book Review, she confessed that she was perplexed. "Errand" is the story of the death of Chekhov. Robinson supposed that Carver was inviting comparison between himself and Chekhov, but if so, she did not see it, much as she admired them both.
The confusion is understandable. While "Errand" is full of Chekhovian touches--surprises delivered in a complete prose deadpan, methodically thorough detail, small paradoxical moments that reveal character--the touches sound contrived and unnatural in Carver's hands. If "Errand" were akin to Harold Bloom's apophrades, a return from the dead of an old literary influence, the styles of Carver and Chekhov would merge without seams. Instead they jar.
Carver would never bury a sentence like "Suddenly, without warning, blood began gushing from his mouth" in the middle of a lengthy paragraph. Nor would Carver use a phrase like "Suddenly, without warning" in one of his own stories, because, in addition to the dated gentility of the phrase, it is redundant. Furthermore, in his homage to Chekhov, Carver adopts a pace that is not as tight as his own, a pace that surveys each scene with caution and scrutiny before proceeding.
The clunky style of "Errand" is a throwback to the 19th century, but "Errand" is an experiment, a post-modern experiment, on the border between fiction and non-fiction. Capote's In Cold Blood and, more recently, Don DeLillo's Libra are other examples of the post-modern urge to cross genres and mix fact with fiction. Seen in this light, "Errand" is not a return of older influences, it is a departure from the rigid prohibitions that minimalism can impose.
The interaction between life (non-fiction) and art (fiction) fascinated and troubled Chekhov as much as Carver. Chekhov's lover, Lydia Avilov, recorded in her memoirs that Chekhov's story, "About Love," was material stolen from their furtive affair. Ms. Avilov reproached Chekhov for his theft: "The colder the writer, the more sensitive and moving his story. Let the reader weep over it. That's what art is for, isn't it?"
Like the Carver figure in "Intimacy," Chekhov did not try to excuse himself from the theft. His reply to her letter was gentle. He wrote about the weather and his plans for a trip abroad. His response to her accusation was a plea for compassion: "All I can say is: another man's soul is a dark well."
John Cheever, in a lecture he delivered on Chekhov before his death, noted how often Chekhov crossed the border between life and art. "In reading a dozen stories of Chekhov," Cheever said.
one might guess that his dogs, if he had any, would be named Bromide and Quinine, that he would marry a brilliant and cranky actress and that he would make his last journey on earth in a load of shellfish. But it is not this magic element of predictability in a writer's destiny that concerns us but the stamina and courage he brings in an effort to vary this magic.
Cheever believed that most people, not just writers, live lives that are charmed with a daily interaction between reality and imagination, and that what impresses us in a writer is not the mystery of the interaction, but the slant that the writer applies to the mystery. Raymond Carver's brave experiments are well worth reading.